The Scavenger

Jonathan Gold eats as if his manhood depended on it—he fears only scrambled eggs.

Illustration by Lara Tomlin

For nearly twenty-five years, Jonathan Gold, the high-low priest of the Los Angeles food scene, has been chronicling the city’s carts and stands and dives and holes-in-mini-malls; its Peruvian, Korean, Uzbek, Isaan Thai, and Islamic Chinese restaurants; the places that serve innards, insects, and extremities. He tells his readers where to get crickets, boiled silkworm cocoons, and fried grasshoppers (“The mellow, pecanlike flavor isn’t bad”). On their behalf, he eats hoof and head and snout, and reveals, before the Census Bureau does, which new populations have come to town, and where they are, and what they’re cooking up. In April, he announced a recent migration from Mexico’s Distrito Federal. How did he know? You could now get D.F.-style carnitas in Highland Park, “loose and juicy, spilling out of the huge $1.99 tacos like Beyoncé out of a tight jumpsuit.” It was the same month that the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first two U.S. cases of swine flu, both in California. Gold recommended the tacos de nana—pig uterus—“chewy yet forgiving, pink and yet not, whorled in swoops and paisley shapes that defy Euclidean geometry.”

Two years ago, Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, a first for a food writer, and a first for his home paper, the free, alternative L.A. Weekly. He abides by George Orwell’s rule of thumb: the fancier the restaurant, the more people who have dripped sweat into your food. Interesting cuisine, he believes, often comes out of poverty. “I have my thing,” he says. “Traditional—I hate the word ‘ethnic’—restaurants that serve some actual hunger people have, rather than something they tell themselves they must have.” He sees Los Angeles as “the anti-melting pot”—the home of true, undiluted regional cookery—but also has a fondness for what he calls the “triple carom”: the Cajun seafood restaurant that caters to Chinese customers and is run by Vietnamese from Texas. Gold is read by chefs (Nancy Silverton, Michael Cimarusti, Wolfgang Puck), and by food nerds in their thirties who live in Silver Lake and Echo Park and spend their weekends retracing his steps. There are people who consider “Counter Intelligence,” a collection of Gold’s columns that was published in 2000, one of the great contemporary books about Los Angeles. Several years ago, after giving a lecture at Pitzer College, Gold was approached by a CalTech geneticist, whose food hobby had once extended to cooking up specimens over the Bunsen burner in his lab, and who could recite long passages from reviews that Gold had written a decade before. They became great friends.

Javier Cabral, who writes the blog Teenage Glutster (subtitle: “Food, Adolescence, Angst, Hormones and a Really, Really Fast Metabolism”), is one of Gold’s most devoted fans. He lives with his parents, first-generation immigrants from Mexico, in East Los Angeles. Under Gold’s influence, the Glutster, who used to eat at fast-food chains daily, began to seek out the traditional specialties of his neighborhood, like birria (goat stew), which he had never tried before. He started the blog in 2005, when he was sixteen and a junior in high school. “I learned from Jonathan Gold that food writing doesn’t need to be so hosh-posh, snobby, and froufrou,” the Glutster told me. “It can be ghetto.”

Last year, the Glutster’s mother took him to a healing mass at La Iglesia Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, his local parish, in the hope that it would cure him of his fascination with food, which she finds worrisome. He left before the service ended, and, taking a walk around the neighborhood, came upon the day’s true “revelation,” as he put it on his blog: a Oaxacan spot, Moles la Tia, that served twenty varieties of mole. Later, Gold reviewed the restaurant, in the style that has come to be his signature, a postmodern scrapbook of divergent references that run with the internal logic of a dream. The mole negro, he wrote, is “so dark that it seems to suck the light out of the airspace around it, spicy as a novela and bitter as tears.” Further, it “appears so glossy and rich that I am always tempted to test its consistency by stabbing an index finger into it, and the resulting stain lingers as long as the empurpled digits of patriotic Iraqi voters.” And, finally, “The last time I was as inspired by glossy black, it was part of Charles Ray’s infamous sculpture Ink Box, and it was enshrined in a major museum of art.” In the column, Gold also mentioned the Teenage Glutster, thereby putting him on the food-blogging map.

Gold’s jackets, snug and black and leather, encase him like the skin around a boudin noir, which, being pig-derived, is among his favorite foods. Lately, he has been wearing a small close-cropped mustache, and his hair, a graying red cascade, curls over his shoulders. His skin is fair and freckled; his eyes—twitchy, restless—are blue. When, starting in 1999, he went to New York for a few years to be a restaurant critic at Gourmet, maître d’s around the city hastened to get a bead on his appearance. The word went out: “Biker.” Gold has been mistaken for the chef Jonathan Waxman—“Another hairy Californian,” he says—and for Mario Batali, though, according to him, “I’m much better-looking than Mario.” His hip-hop name, given to him by Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, is Nervous Cuz. (Gold was a music journalist in the eighties and nineties.) He is sly and erudite, withdrawn in person and in print exuberant. The avant-garde composer Carl Stone, who has titled many of his pieces after restaurants that Gold has introduced him to, considers him the S. J. Perelman of food.

Gold is forty-nine, and grew up in South Central. His mother, Judith, was the librarian at a rough public school, a witty, lively woman who had been a magician’s assistant and a minor theatre actress; his father, Irwin, an aspiring academic, studied under Richard Ellmann but got polio before he could finish his dissertation. He became a probation officer; Roman Polanski was one of his cases. (The filmmakers behind the recent documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” used Irwin’s copious, finely written probation report in their research.) He was passionate about classical music, literature, and comfort food (Chicago-style hot dogs, all-you-can-eat buffets, lunch-counter burgers); aiming to please him, Jonathan, the oldest of three sons, took up cello, reading, and eating. He failed to win his father’s approval: Irwin claimed never to have read Jonathan’s columns. After his father died, Jonathan cleaned out Irwin’s car and found a complete file of his work in the trunk and Verdi’s “Requiem” in the tape deck.

At sixteen, Gold left the house. It was the late seventies; he stayed with friends and, he says, in the months before the Iranian Revolution, squatted in Beverly Hills houses that had been bought but not yet occupied by families from Tehran. On the strength of his cello playing, he went to U.C.L.A., where, for a time, he lived in his practice room. The music professors at U.C.L.A. didn’t like him much: his compositions tended to involve homeless people swearing into microphones. He plugged in his cello and started playing it in a punk band.

During his freshman year, Gold took a course in cultural geography and was assigned to make an ethnic map of a block of Beverly Boulevard not far from downtown. At a laundromat, he saw Salvadorans saving dryers for Salvadorans, and overheard Mexicans who spoke not Spanish but Nahuatl. The 7-Eleven, he noticed, was owned by Koreans. As luck would have it, the block included Shibucho—one of the first Japanese restaurants, Gold says, to expel patrons for ordering California rolls—and he tried sushi. Later, for a class that he took with the performance artist Chris Burden, Gold made a piece that involved going to every Jewish deli in the city and buying two water bagels using only pennies; one he ate and one he saved to hang behind plastic on the studio wall. This was how he discovered that all the good delis in Los Angeles had a single bagel source: the Brooklyn Bagel Bakery, started in 1953 by immigrants from New York.

After leaving U.C.L.A., Gold was living on Pico Boulevard, above a kosher butcher in an Iranian Jewish enclave, and working at a legal newspaper downtown. Taking the bus east on Pico every day, he passed through Korean, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Oaxacan, and Jaliscan areas. As an experiment, he set out to try every restaurant—places that served pupusas, chili fries, Korean barbecue—along the boulevard. He gave himself a year, at the end of which he planned to join the Foreign Service, so that he could go off and have adventures in the world. When he was finished eating Pico, he realized that he could have just as exotic a life without ever leaving Los Angeles.

One day, Gold stopped off at the Brooklyn Bagel Bakery, which is in the part of Echo Park that is now known as Historic Filipinotown. He got four water bagels and three salt; one water bagel went into his cup holder, for noshing. He had just had a so-so Guatemalan meal (chiles rellenos, tamales, pounded-pumpkin-seed stew, and kakik de gallina, a chicken dish that he’d never seen on a menu before), and was on the way to Mama’s Hot Tamales, off MacArthur Park, near Langer’s deli (the source of the city’s best pastrami). “This is one of the gnarlier, gnarlier drug zones in L.A.,” he said, circling Mama’s block. “I was here with my mother, on our way to Langer’s, and people were trying to sell her crack.” An apartment where he lived for ten years, until the 1992 riots trashed the neighborhood and he moved to Pasadena, was just a couple of miles away. At Mama’s, he ate a chicken tamale with red sauce, and a pork tamale with green. He took a pound of coffee beans to go, and swung back west, to hit a Peruvian restaurant owned by Koreans that sits in a median, next to a car wash, and specializes in spit-roasted chicken and grilled beef heart. “It’s not the best grilled beef heart you’ve ever had,” he said. He was picking up a chicken for supper and, since he was there, ordered a fermented-corn drink and half a chicken to stay.

Gold eats at three to five hundred restaurants every year. “Food rewards obsessiveness,” he says. His friend Robert Sietsema told me that, in the three years Gold was based in New York, Sietsema, who is the food critic for the Village Voice and presumably accustomed to eating a lot, gained twenty-five pounds. “We really put on the feed bag,” he said. Not long ago, Sietsema said, Gold visited: “He and I went on a typical binge. We started with porchetta sandwiches, then went to David Chang’s new bakery for foccaccia with kimchi, then we had salty-pistachio soft-serve ice cream, cookies, and coffee milk. Then we went to a pizzeria famous for its artichoke slice, where we also had a Sicilian slice, and then we took the train to Flushing and visited a new Chinese food court and had half a dozen Chinese dishes there. Then we went to the old food court down the street, visited three more stalls, and had a bunch of things, including lamb noodles, and then Jonathan had to go to dinner somewhere. After dinner, he stopped by my apartment, and we went to Ten Downing, where we ate another three-course dinner.”

For years, Gold’s itinerant eating seemed purposeless; then, suddenly, as with the hungry caterpillar in the Eric Carle book, there was a glorious, fully realized point to it. John Powers, a film critic who met Gold at the Weekly in the mid-eighties, when Gold was a proofreader there, says, “He has the flâneur instinct. In all those years, when his peers were very busy professionally writing, Jonathan was professionally wandering around not writing. By background, inclination, and practice, he has always been the one who knows the most stuff close to the ground.”

At the Weekly, when Gold was in his mid-twenties, he met Laurie Ochoa, a beautiful, dark-haired intern who had just finished college, and wooed her with dollar seats for the L.A. Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, and a slice of his mother’s peach pie. They got married, over a roast pig at Campanile, in 1990, and she has been his dining companion and first reader ever since. They went together to the Los Angeles Times, where she worked as an editor and writer under Ruth Reichl and he wrote restaurant reviews, and then to Gourmet (where she was the executive editor). When Ochoa was hired as the editor of the Weekly, in 2001, Gold came back, too. (Several months ago, Ochoa resigned under pressure from Village Voice Media, which owns the Weekly.) They have two children, Leon, who is six, and Isabel, fifteen. Isabel likes tentacles but can’t abide anything spicy; Leon is in a protracted rice-and-chicken phase.

The formal rigor that Gold applied to his early eating jags has become a recurring motif. He likes a culinary picaresque, and often takes the kids. They have accompanied him on hot-dog, hot-chocolate, and gelato sprees. The day he decided to find the city’s best espresso, he travelled with David Kendrick, who was then the drummer for Devo. After twenty-seven shots, Gold—sweating, trembling, and talking too loud—met up with Ochoa and some friends for dinner. He started to panic and begged the group not to get dessert. When Ochoa ordered tiramisu, he burst into tears, ran out of the restaurant, and took the bus home.

Gold drives twenty thousand miles a year in search of food. “I go into a fugue state, like the Aboriginal dreamtime, when you go on long, aimless walks in the outback,” he says. “That’s how I feel driving on the endless streets of Los Angeles County.” Any given afternoon will find him in a green pickup truck, heading east from Pasadena into the far reaches of the San Gabriel Valley, an expansive territory of suburban cities and unincorporated towns, with an estimated population of two million people—one-fifth the population of the county.

Over the past thirty years, the San Gabriel Valley has transformed from a working-class white suburb of faded bowling alleys and German restaurants into a place where it is possible to live quite comfortably speaking nothing but Chinese. In the seventies, the San Gabriel city of Monterey Park was successfully pitched to wealthy Taiwanese as “the Chinese Beverly Hills”; by 1990, according to “The Ethnic Quilt,” a book about the demographics of Southern California, the city was thirty-six per cent Chinese and known as Little Taipei. With the 1997 handover, well-capitalized Hong Kongers arrived, settling in Monterey Park and in the nearby towns of San Marino, Alhambra, Rosemead, and Arcadia. In the past year or two, Gold has noticed a surge of new restaurants serving very hot country-style food from Sichuan, a shift that he attributes to migration after the 2008 earthquake.

Eating in the San Gabriel Valley, Gold has observed that, unlike in New York, where immigrants quickly broaden and assimilate their cooking styles to reflect the city’s collective idea of “Chinese food,” the insular nature of Los Angeles allows imported regional cuisines to remain intact, traceable almost to the restaurant owners’ villages of origin. “The difference is that in New York they’re cooking for us,” Gold told me. “Here they’re cooking for themselves.”

Not long ago, Gold alighted from his truck at a mini-mall in Rowland Heights, several towns beyond Monterey Park. “This is the rich Chinese neighborhood,” he said. From his pocket he pulled the folded-up flap of an envelope, which was covered with tips and notes scrawled haphazardly in pencil. He wanted to try No. 1 Noodle House, where the specialty is Saliva Chicken—“So hot it makes your mouth water, which is the best of all possible reasons it might be called that,” he said. He had learned about the restaurant in the Chinese-language Yellow Pages. Gold doesn’t speak or read any language but English; he has strong deductive skills, and Google Translate helps.

The noodle shop was closed. Gold consulted his notes, and drove across the street to another mini-mall, where there was a Sichuan restaurant with a string of red chilies draped over the door and a “B” in the window, a grade given by the county health inspector, and posted by law. (Gold subscribes to the rating system whereby “A” stands for American Chinese, “B” is Better Chinese, and “C” is Chinese food for Chinese, but admits that, for years before the grading system was in place, he walked around with constant low-level food poisoning.) He sat down and perused a menu that had been awkwardly translated into English: “Steamed Toad” was the name of one entrée. The waitress came, and he pointed to dam-dam noodles, dumplings, wontons, pork, and a fish special. From a cold case, he chose pig’s ear.

“Cha, please,” he said, ordering tea.

“Huh?” the waitress said.

“Cha—tea,” he said.

“Oh, tea.”

The fish arrived, blue-lipped and bathed in chilies and oil. “Spicy,” Gold said, tasting it. “The dumplings are good, too. And I suspect they smoke their own pork here. It’s good, but I don’t think it’s enough better than the other good Sichuan place, which is twenty miles closer to L.A.” The food was heavy. “They’re cooking the peasant version of these dishes,” he said. “Oil is a sign of generosity.”

Before heading back, Gold wanted to check out a fast-food restaurant called Malan, in yet another mini-mall. “This place in China is the equivalent of McDonald’s,” he said as he approached the door. “It’s the biggest chain, and it’s owned by a big petroleum company. The noodles it serves are a specialty of Lanzhou, which is known for being one of the most polluted cities in China—and for its hand-pulled noodles.” Inside, Gold sat down and ordered a couple of bowlfuls—large round noodles in beef broth, noodles with brown sauce. The kitchen was visible from the dining area. “Note the Mexican guy rolling out the dough and tossing the noodles,” he said, tucking into his soup. “I don’t know why, but that always makes me extremely happy.”

In a fancy restaurant, Gold will wear a rumpled suit and a soft bluish button-down and pay with a credit card issued in the name of his high-school algebra teacher. He has special cell-phone numbers that he uses just for reservations. “It’s like ‘The Bourne Identity’ in slow motion,” he says.

Reviewing the high end was always part of Gold’s mandate. The first piece he wrote for a “slick”—the now defunct California Magazine, edited by Harold Hayes—was a review of Chasen’s, which had been an entertainment-industry staple for fifty years. To Gold, it reeked of Reaganomics and other things that he despised. He wrote that it was “a swell place to celebrate a seventy-fifth birthday or a contra incursion,” and that the famous chili was “distinguishable from a bowl of Dennison’s only by a couple of chunks of sirloin, a 1,600 percent price differential and three guys”—the servers—“who look like they stepped out of a 1935 gangster B-movie.” He has his regrets. “Although I didn’t do Chasen’s in”—it was around for another decade—“I certainly put a lance in its side,” he says. “But, looking back, I really miss Chasen’s. And kiwi vinaigrette and magical caviar snakes and braised cantaloupe with black-corn fungus and all the things I thought were the future back then—a lot of that food was just silly.”

In 1990, Gold started writing about Renu Nakorn, an Isaan Thai place twenty miles southeast of downtown, next to a working dairy farm. After his reviews, large numbers of white people started coming in. They ordered what he had ordered: slimy bamboo salads, fermented fish, and intensely spicy dishes—authentic regional Thai food that the owners, Bill and Saipin Chutima, were worried the customers would send back. Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic for Vogue, made a pilgrimage (the Chutimas said that his postprandial cigar was disrupted by the stench of cows), and so did Mark Bittman, of the New York Times. When the Chutimas moved to Las Vegas and opened a new place, Lotus of Siam, Gold called it the best Thai restaurant in North America; this year, Saipin, who does the cooking, was nominated for a James Beard award. Gold put it this way once: “As the Italians say of Christopher Columbus, when he discovered America it stayed discovered.”

To Gold’s readers, his reviews have the ontological status that the New York Times has for people interested in current events: he doesn’t write about it because it is; it is because he’s written about it. In March, he published a column titled “The New Cocktailians,” about a movement of bartenders who dress like punk-rock dandies (suspenders and tattoos) and treat drinks as a culinary art, shopping at farmers’ markets for fresh produce and educating customers about the origins of the gin fizz. By fall, all food-minded Los Angeles understood, without knowing exactly how or why it knew, that a cocktail moment was in full swing.

Last month, Gold hosted a benefit event at Union Station, the train depot downtown. There were concoctions from new cocktailians (Manhattans made with Luxardo cherries, champagne drinks with absinthe-citrus foam), paired with morsels from some of Gold’s favorite highbrow places: pig sliders and pigs’ ears from a sleek bistro; pork terrine from Palate, in Glendale; bacon-wrapped matzo balls from the winner of “Top Chef,” season two. The food nerds were out in force: bloggers from the local sites that track Gold’s every move. Neil Kohan—thirty-one, receding hair, camera slung over his shoulder—sipped a Manhattan and declared Gold the Thom Yorke of food writing. (His blog, Food Marathon, chronicles his eating itineraries, many of them heavily informed by Gold.) The author of the blog The Delicious Life urged Gold to try her Chivas Mamie Taylor—Chivas Regal twelve-year-old Scotch, ginger syrup, fresh lime juice, soda water, and crushed ice, also made from Chivas Regal. He sipped. “It’s delicious,” he said. “But something about it tastes a little like pool water, too.” She was delighted. That was just the kind of thing that only Jonathan Gold would say.

Gold guzzled hot sauce as a kid, and he still eats as if his manhood depended on it. (The only thing he fears is scrambled eggs.) A few months ago, writing about a Muslim-style Koreatown restaurant—“a nondescript corner dining room where northeastern Chinese cooks prepare the Beijing version of Xinxiang barbecue for a Korean-speaking clientele”—Gold recommended what he called “the winciest dish in town: a sharp, glistening steel skewer stabbed through thin coins of meat sliced from a bull penis, which bubble and hiss when they encounter the heat of the fire, sizzling from proud quarters to wizened, chewy dimes.” It was straight onomatopoeia, with a floater of tonic: “It doesn’t taste like much, this bull penis, pretty much just cartilage and char, but the spectacle is as emasculating as a Jonas Brothers CD.”

Gold suspects that he has encouraged those he calls the “dining-as-sport” crowd: “I’ll see your live octopus and raise you a chicken foot. Oh, so you’re going to eat small intestine full of undigested cow’s milk?” He’s right. An avid reader, once laid up for two weeks after eating Korean beef-liver sashimi at a restaurant recommended by Gold, told me, “I feel that, because he’s willing to eat this stuff, it’s almost like a dare. I have to try it, even if it’s horrifying.”

The other night, the stunt dish was san nak ji, live octopus, in a divey strip-mall restaurant with a mermaid on the sign and a Korean golf show on the television set. Gold said he thought that the space had once been occupied by Alex Donut, which was one of three places in town to get Thai food in the late seventies. “There’s a huge tradition in L.A. of Southeast Asians, mostly Cambodians, making doughnuts,” he said. “There’s nothing Southeast Asian about doughnuts, but one guy came over and opened a doughnut shop, and then they all started coming from Phnom Penh to do it.”

Korean sashimi came to the table—big hunks of white tuna, with the taste and texture of chilled butter; fresh-killed halibut—along with sea squirts and pickled mackerel eggs. Then the proprietor produced the main event, a plate of slippery gray tentacles, wiggling anxiously. “It’ll try to climb up the chopstick,” Gold said, dousing a tentacle in sesame oil to loosen the grip of its suckers. “I don’t actually know that much about octopus physiology. Most people say that the octopus is dead, and just twitching, but I don’t know. It looks pretty alive to me.” (Gold’s youngest brother, Mark, runs the marine conservation organization Heal the Bay; needless to say, he finds Jonathan’s eating habits atrocious.)

Gold bit into the octopus. “I thought I was completely full from lunch, but this is invigorating food,” he said. More courses came—broiled eel and broths and a greasy red kimchi pancake and, finally, crab claws covered in a sticky glaze, lustrous as a ceramic sculpture by Jeff Koons.

In a Hollywood mini-mall with a red mansard roof, next to a Thai video store, a Thai barber, and a Thai spa, is a restaurant called Jitlada. For decades, it was known as a respectable place to get decent Thai food. Then, in the spring of 2007, a visiting Chicagoan discovered that Jitlada had an untranslated menu of hard-to-find southern-Thai specialties—sour oxtail soup, dried-mudfish curry, pickled-crab salad—which had been added by the brother and sister, Suthiporn (Tui) Sungkamee and Jazz Singsanong, who had recently taken over the restaurant. The Chicagoan posted an English-language version of the southern-Thai menu on a Chicago Web site, creating a sensation in the food-blogging world.

Gold, naturally, got wind of it, and went to try the special menu for himself. On one visit, he brought Carl Stone, the composer. They ordered kua kling, a dry-beef curry, and asked for it “Bangkok hot.” (Stone carries a card in his wallet that says, more or less, in Thai, “Yes, I know I’m not Thai, but please give me the food as spicy as I request.”)

Jazz, a voluble woman, came over to their table and started chatting. All she needed to make the restaurant a success, she said, was for Jonathan Gold to review it; she had been praying in her Buddha room every day for him to walk through the door. Did they know him, or know what he looked like? she asked. Stone says, “I was going to throw out a red herring—‘He’s tall and thin with a full head of hair’—but Jonathan started laughing and introduced himself.” Gold, in his review, praised the “delicious, foul-smelling yellow curries” and the “strange, mephitic fragrances” of wild tea leaves and stinky beans, and said that Jitlada was “the most exciting new Thai restaurant of the year.”

The other day, Gold went to Jitlada for a late lunch. Jazz, dressed all in black, with heavy golden medallions around her neck, made a fuss when she saw him. “I miss you!” she said. She shuttled him to a table in the back, where it was cool and quiet, and brought him a big Thai beer. Dishes started coming from the kitchen before Gold had a chance to ask for them: pork curry and papaya salad and fish-kidney curry. “People from Thailand were in here in the morning, ordering kidney,” Jazz said. “I thought of you.”

Gold started to reminisce about the spiciness of the spiciest kua kling that Jazz had ever served him, the first day they met. “It was glowing, practically incandescent,” he said. “You bite into it and every alarm in your body goes off at once. It’s an overload on your pain receptors, and then the flavors just come through. It’s not that the hotness overwhelms the dish, which is what people who don’t understand Thai cooking always say, but that the dish is revealed for the first time—its flavor—as you taste details of fruit and turmeric and spices that you didn’t taste when it was merely extremely hot. It’s like a hallucination.”

Jazz went into the kitchen and, a few minutes later, returned with a round platter, laden with big tear-shaped leaves, minced onion, tiny lime wedges, fresh ginger, toasted coconut, green chilies, and dried shrimp, arranged in a pinwheel pattern. In the middle was a thick, sweet palm-sugar sauce. Jazz took a leaf and made Gold a perfect little tangy, fishy, tart, hot, candylike bundle. “The sauce is so good,” he said.